BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese surgeons are declaring a breakthrough in cancer treatment after turning a patient's malignant tumour into a ball of ice, state media said on Saturday.
Doctors at Xijing Hospital in the northwestern city of Xian inserted a superconductive knife, two millimetres in diameter, into the tumour of liver cancer patient, Xinhua news agency said.
By forcing high-pressure argon and helium gas through the knife point, they were able to lower the temperature of the tumour to -140 degrees Celsius (-220 Fahrenheit).
"In 60 seconds, the tumour became an ice ball," the article said, adding "all cancer cells were killed."
"The operation took only 30 minutes. The patient felt no pain and there was no bleeding," it said.
"The therapy is a breakthrough in cancer treatment," it quoted Dou Kefeng, a surgeon in charge of the operation, as saying.

China has 1/4 of the world population, so what does it matter if they
lose a few thousand to unregulated experimental medicine (or was that
WW2 era Germany)?

Superconductor = an electrical property of a material to pass awsome
amounts of electrical current when cooled to near Absolute Zero (well
past 400 degrees F. below zero). At -220F., we are not talking
superconductor in the ELECTRICAL sense.

Surgical knife = Normally stainless steel due to the human body not
reacting with the metal, and the fact that the porosity of the metal
is very low and does not trap "garbage". Stainless is a very poor
conducter of thermal energy, compared to copper, aluminum, tin, lead,
solder, and other metals and alloys, so we are not talking
superconductor in the THERMAL sense.

Cryogenics = Compressing a gas under extreme pressure (2500+ PSI)
until it is in liquid form, then releasing it through a tiny orfice
to expand and absorb thermal energy. The cooling effect of expanding
any of the gasses that remain in gasseous form during the entire
process is minimal and inefficient, so we are not talking cooling in
the CRYOGENIC sense.

Overall, it appears to me that the author of the news was not talking
in the COMMON sense, either.

Yes, they've done this in the U.S. for years, it's called
"cryotherapy". The trouble with it is where the edge of the "ice ball"
appears to be on CT or US is still viable tissue in many cases. With
cancer treatment, that's not good enough.

Unfortunately, this has been tried and has failed. My only guess on
why they're doing it in this case is the dismal prospects for
treatment in someone with a big hepatocellular CA.

No, gangrene sets in in the presence of bacteria, and is basically an
infection of tissue. Inside the body if a piece of tissue dies, it is
liquefied to some extent and/or fibrosed, but in general does not
present a health hazard in itself. There are some lethal exceptions to
this, obviously.

There are plenty of other alternative therapies, and of course, they
are not legally available here in the US (that ol' greed steppin' in
again...most of the following therapies are curative after only a few
treatments and some can be replicated for very little money, you
see). However, you can go to Canada, New Zealand, Australia or Europe
and avail yourself of alternative therapies. Some of these include:
introveneous ozone therapy, hyperbaric oxygen chamber therapy
(excellent for runaway bacterialogical infection...not illegal here
in the US, but rarely used for this purpose) Rife therapy, or you can
simply buy or build yourself a blood electrification unit, the theory
from which was based on 3 patents awarded to Dr. Caali of the Albert
Einstein College of Medicine in New York in 1993, where they
established an extremely high rate of viral die off when 100
microamperes of electricity was applied to a petri dish of aids virus
swimming in human blood.

All of them work, all of them will ameliorate symptoms of, and often
outright cure, the disease with little or no side effects.